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ERNST LUBITSCH

'As soon as someone tackles a big theme with a message we take him seriously and call it art. We appreciate a painting of the crucifixion . . . whereas a simple Cezanne depiction of a vase and an apple may be far more enduring as art. I believe -- and I am not comparing myself to Cezanne -- in taking a lesser theme and then treating it withoutcompromise.' -- Ernst Lubitsch

LABELS

There are (currently) eight different LABELS to look for on MAKSQUIBS.

CONTEST - Win a review of any NetFlix DVD of your choice* if you're the first to answer a Q attached to one of the write-ups. Please refrain from either Googling or searching for an answer via IMdB or other web movie services! These contests are plenty easy to solve just be using your little grey cells.

*Due to the possibility of severe allergic reaction, the management claims the right to refuse any film that includes work by the following 'talents': Oliver Stone; Neil LaBute; Robin Williams; Juliette Lewis, Jennifer Jason Leigh & Steve Guttenberg .

RECOMMENDED - Meaning Strongly Recommended. A film that's good enough or historically important enough to demand viewing. WARNING: A few real stinkers are important enough to rate this label. And, on the other hand, lots of pretty good or pretty valuable films, don't quite measure up to our RECOMMENDED level. (See also UNIQUE, below.)

FAMILY FRIENDLY - CAREFUL!! Not necessarily a KIDDIE pic, but a film that school kids may get into if the subject interests. You'll find foreign &silent pics in here as the need to read the sub-titles & inter-titles to follow the narrative andget all the jokes does wonders for ADD types.

LINK - To quickly find any Write-Up that includes an InterNet Link of interest for that specific film.

UNIQUE -Films that may not fit into the usual critical categories of Good, Bad or Indifferent, (certainly not indifferent!), but are worth watching because there just ain't nothing like 'em. Sui generis pics. (Phooey generis if they don't work for you.)

READ ALL ABOUT IT -While there's a book or two (or ten dozen) closely related to just about any film you might think of, here's a specific book you might not have known about (or thought of) that opens a window on the chosen title.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY - A place to vent those out-of-left-field thoughts.

POSTER - Hmm, I bet you can figure this one out.

(Hint: most of the posters will enlarge if you click on them.)

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT- sort of like those EAT THIS, NOT THAT diet books only with film instead of food as the topic. Sometimes, the substitute pick isn't the obvious 'better' choice, but one of those 'flawed-but-interesting' films that often get left behind.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID- some easy to miss element worth noting.

SILENT FILM - hey, figure it out (LOL)

. . . and DOUBLE-BILL - a suggested second feature.

To bring up the complete list in any of these categories, simply click on one of the LABELS when you come across one and everything with that designation will come up when the page reloads. Just scroll down. There's also a LABELS list near the bottom of all the pages.

AND YOU'RE DOING ALL THIS BECAUSE . . . ?

Like just about everyone with an interest in the movies, I'm watching more films on DVD and going out to movie houses a lot less. Convenience trumps the better experience. Of course, you lose audience interaction and the poor film now has to compete with all the comforts of home. It's a bit like seeing Rembrandts & Titians in a book reproduction, or from posters with iffy color values, no texture or weight to the surface and the wrong dimensions . . . all while snacking on chips & soda. (Oops! You get that at your local cinema,too.) The ease of instant movie gratification risks turning an art form (well, sometimes) into little more than low-grade eye-candy & mind­fodder. So, maybe it's worthwhile to write a bit down on what we're all viewing, just to keep fully engaged.DVDs: the latest opiate of the people meets the internet, where everyone's a critic. God help us.

. . . a brief note on abbreviations . . .

They stem from internet commonalities (w/; wknd; LOL; OTT) and also from the flavorsome antique shorthand still found in ShowBiz trade publications. (Megger = director; lenser = cinematographer; scripter . . . well, you get the idea). They have onomatopoetical appeal and help to keep things pithy.

About Me

Now With More Than 3550 Reviews! Go Nuts - Read 'Em All!!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; over 2500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

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Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

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Thanks for stopping by.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Everybody’s hiding some kind of love that dare not speak its name in John Huston’s expansion of Carson McCuller’s novella. Set at an Army base way down south, Major Marlon Brando is married to Liz Taylor, but only has eyes for soldier-boy Robert Forster. He’s got a thing for horses, rides ‘em barebacked & bareass, but will stand at attention to watch La Liz sleep the night away. Not that she knows, she’s too tired from love-in-the-afternoon with Brian Keith, the Colonel next door who’s devoted, in a chaste way, to Julie Harris, his neurasthenic wife. She, in turn, despises him, preferring to gossip with their fey, Philippino houseboy. Whew, that’s a burgoo & a half! The film is usually considered one of Huston many misfires from this period, and he does lose control of the material at times, but there are extraordinary things in here. Certainly, no one in the cast is phoning it in. Taylor is a perfect fit for a change, even her squally voice doesn’t hurt; broad of bust, broad of beam & more than a tad mean, she’s wicked funny. Brando, in a role meant for Monty Clift, plays as if on a dare, beating himself up in a vanity-free mode that prefigures LAST TANGO/’73, though the accent is close to impenetrable. These two might be Brick & Maggie the Cat a few years down the road. With all it’s faults, you can’t keep your eyes off this one. NOTE: Huston desaturated the original prints, leaving a golden tone and pale hues on a nearly b&w image. But when the film flopped, the studio switched back to full color. The current DVD offers Huston’s ‘golden’ look, but the accompanying trailer gives a good idea of what the fully loaded TechniColor prints must have looked like. The difference is startling.

Monday, November 28, 2011

The penultimate release in the six canonical James Bond pics* is heavy on big sets and light on storyline. Based largely in Japan, it’s the one with kidnapped space capsules and our first good look at Super Villain Blofeld. Why it’s Donald Pleasence with a monocle shaped scar!; he’s trying to start a shooting war between the US and the USSR! And there’s Sean Connery’s 007, undergoing a new form of torture as five Asian vixens doll him up to ‘pass’ as a humble Japanese fisherman! (With that nose?) Lewis Gilbert, fresh from helming ALFIE/’66, nips the incipient bloat of THUNDERBALL/’65 while lenser Freddie Young gives it all a classy look, plus better-than-usual process work and a visually memorable poisoning. If only it were more involving. Blame Roald Dahl’s script which comes up short on the narrative thru line. Then again, it’s not so much the action scenes & stunts, nor the evil plots & hi-tech gadgets that separate the better Bonds from the lesser, it’s (of all things) his level of rapport with the leading ladies. And there ain’t no heat between Bond and his babes in this one.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The last of the ‘first cycle’ Bonds, ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE/’69, is famously spoiled by its grotesquely inadequate (and grotesque) Connery replacement, George Lazenby. Even so, it’s got the best female lead of them all in Diana Rigg and retains the balanced blend of playfulness, action & villainous sadism that made these early entries work. Connery’s one-shot return in #7, DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER/’71, swapped playfulness with self-referential mockery, a misfiring mistake that continued in even the best of the Roger Moore pics. The films have been in reaction mode ever since; currently the pendulum is stuck in an ‘overcorrected’ position, perhaps permanently.

StotDII: Note our posters - On the Left - Britain, where girls come first; On the Right - the States, where the preference is for action. This explains too much!

Friday, November 25, 2011

Poland’s ‘Man-of-Cinema,’ Andrzej Wajda, was a vital 81 when he made this film about the WWII Katyn Forest massacre, a national tragedy for Poland, where 20,000 POW officers were taken out of their detention cells and shot like cattle. It was made all the worse when the occupying Germans used the incident as propaganda against the Russian Army and then, after the war, when the Russians moved in, rewritten as a Nazi atrocity. Wajda wants to do more than point the finger at those responsible, the Russians have long been held as the perpetrators, he wants to show, thru a series of loosely related personal stories, mostly on the homefront, how this open wound refracted thru Polish society; the noble, the ignoble, the stupid. It’s a great topic, an important one. But, as so often with Wajda, the film is considerably less than the sum of its parts. The opening is just right as masses of displaced Poles approach a bridge in the country. There are thousands on foot, fleeing the Germans. Ahead, two boys come running with news, the Russians are coming! It’s no fanciful metaphor; it’s the Polish dilemma in a nutshell. An equally telling sequence shows one of the POWs’ father, a professor whose university is summarily closed by the SS as a hotbed of free-thinkers. The entire staff is forced into vans and taken on a one-way trip to a Concentration Camp. Terrifying stuff, superbly staged, the finest thing in the film. And there are other impressive moments, but also too many that are jumbled or merely judgmental. Those noble, ignoble & stupid people again. Perhaps it’s all true, but Wajda never convinces us. And by the end, when the film jumps back to show the nuts & bolts of the massacre, we’re prompted to feel the devastation, the inhumanity, the sheer waste. You may not respond.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

This classic football fable looks more cheerfully Politically Incorrect than ever, and the years have added a nostalgic charm to its many virtues. Burt Reynolds, at the start of his decade-long run at the top of the heap and already looking the worse for wear, is just right as the don’t-give-a-damn ex-pro who gets stuck in a segregated Southern prison after tearing up his rich wife, her rich car & a short cop. Under orders to whip up a sacrificial team of prisoners for a tune-up game against the Semi-Pro prison guards, he doesn’t just find a team, he also finds himself. Robert Aldrich and regular lenser Joseph Biroc shoot from the hip, trying to catch as much spontaneity as they can, letting function dictate the compositions. Even fans will admit that the comedy & drama fall into the crude, rude & lewd department, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But perhaps 'savagely blunt' gets closer to the mark. That’s what triggers the comedy, excessive bluntness, which bubbles up not only from the physical mayhem & comic reversals, but goes a bit deeper from the detailed character set-ups in the pic’s first half. Aldrich certainly takes his time doing this. At one point he lets a whole Laurel & Hardy routine play out in a swamp between Reynolds & another chain-gang convict. But that’s why he can afford to let the big game carry the entire third act. (M*A*S*H*/’70 is an obvious point of reference.) As chief bad guy, Eddie Albert lets his tailoring do much of the work, this prison warden looks like the Chamber of Commerce, and a super strong cast of up and coming character actors all get their moment. The only downside is seeing Burt Reynolds in the ugliest pair of pants in film history, noting the odd resemblance to Marlon Brando, and knowing what miserable career choices he would soon start to make.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The cheesy singing cheerleaders (a sort of lowdown MOTOWN act) are a lot more entertaining than most SuperBowl halftime spectaculars.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

M-G-M hoped to continue their winning ways with Dickens adaptations following DAVID COPPERFIELD/’35 and A TALE OF TWO CITIES/’35) with this Christmas classic. Initially planned for Lionel Barrymore who was under contract & already established on radio as America’s Scrooge, his severe arthritis put him out of the running. (Of course, he played a ‘near’ Scrooge for Frank Capra in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE/’46. But try to hear one of his annual outings of the real thing on radio, especially the ones he did with Orson Welles & the Mercury Players on the Campbell Playhouse.) Reginald Owen wound up playing Ebenezer, and he’s perfectly fine, but the project was demoted to a glorified ‘programmer,’ with all departments going thru the motions under hack megger Edwin Marin. With the storyline already squeezed to fit on a measly six reels, the half dozen ‘improvements’ are particularly wasteful and unfortunate. And where are Ignorance & Want; the kids who hide by the feet of Christmas Present? It is kind of fun to see Gene, Kathleen & young June Lockhart as Crachets, and Leo G Carroll hollers splendidly as Jacob Marley, but everything else is bland, bland, bland. The best reason to watch this may be as a comparison with the marvelously efficient story construction of the much-loved 1951 British version. Alastair Sims’ stupendously effective, perfectly judged Scrooge has always been its calling-card, but a recent restoration from VCI (on a 2007 two-disc edition) makes it easier to appreciate the craftsmanship of Noel Langley’s script & Brian Desmond-Hurst’s helming. Moving, funny, and damned scary at times, it’s only two reels longer than the M-G-M film, yet manages nearly twice the story. And the cleaner visuals show how well the lensing & art design serve Dickens’ tricky mix of exaggeration, sentiment & toughness, keeping everything in balance. It’s also the only version to include a devastating (and motivationally important) deathbed scene for Scrooge’s sister. (A fine addition Dickens missed.) And there's a worthy EXTRA on the deluxe VCI edition, an interesting, if occasionally crude, British version from 1935 that shows, even thru a poor print and some savage story editing, some nice visual style. Those willing to squint, will find some neat moments, including a nice bit when the shadow of Christmas Future seems to drape itself over Scrooge’s face. Very creepy! (The Recommendation below is just for the 1951 film.)

DOUBLE-BILL: Clive Donner who edited the Sims pic directed a notable tv version (in color) with George C. Scott in excellent form/’84; and don’t forget the sui generis magic of MISTER MAGOO’S CHRISTMAS CAROL/’62 with a score by Jule Styne who repurposed a discarded song for use in FUNNY GIRL. You know the tune as 'People.’

Monday, November 21, 2011

Micky Ward’s championship career as a welterweight boxer in the ‘90s proves as generic as the title on his bio-pic, though not in a bad way. It’s his life outside the ring with an emasculating mother/manager, an older crack-addled brother/trainer & a strong-willed girlfriend with contagious self-confidence that puts a fresh pair of legs on those winded dramatic tropes. David O Russell helms in a fast-and-loose style, playing up the comedy (and comic horror) in Ward’s large, female-tilted Irish-Catholic family; and he makes this 1990s story feel more like Rocky Balboa’s ‘70s. (Lowell, Mass. tends to run behind the trends, anyway.) Even better, he pulls back from the cinematic boxing pyrotechnics that have dominated the screen since Martin Scorsese overfed the beast in RAGING BULL/’80. As, respectively, controlling mom & scapegrace brother, Melissa Leo & Christian Bale got lots of attention for their fierce, noisy perfs. They’re awfully good, but it’s hard to think of anyone missing with these juicy roles. (Bale is especially fine right at the end, adding a graceful exit that leaves the spotlight on his talented brother. Really moving stuff.) And Amy Adams is just-right as the new girlfriend with excellent film taste. But the film gets its footing from Mark Wahlberg’s stoic decency & body mass, a masterclass in selfless believability. He also nails the accent with more conviction (and less fuss) than anyone since Robert Mitchum ordered a cup of coffee in THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE/’73.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY / DOUBLE-BILL: How come so many boxing pics feature brothers or brothers-in-law in their story lines? CITY FOR CONQUEST/’40; ROCKY/’76; RAGING BULL, even that post-boxing pic, ON THE WATERFRONT/’54.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Imagine one of the darker Ealing Comedies, say KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS/’49, & that old American standby about those murdering biddies, ARSENIC AND OLD LACE/’44, merging with MARY POPPINS/’64. That’s the idea behind this blackly comic tale of a dysfunctional family and their new, sweetly sensible, if criminally insane housekeeper. American writer Richard Russo (NOBODY’S FOOL/’94; EMPIRE STATE/’05) brings a mordant tone & Old Testament sensibilities to a picturesque English village where Rowan Atkinson, nicely playing things straight, is the absent-minded Vicar who’s lost control of his life at home & work. His lovely wife Kristin Scott Thomas is all but throwing herself at the sleazy local golf pro (Patrick Swayze) for comfort & attention while their clinging son is getting trashed by bullies at school and their daughter is busy screwing trash. Enter new housekeeper Maggie Smith, practically perfect in every way, to sort things out . . . with a blunt instrument. You know the filmmakers are playing for keeps when a barking dog gets ‘offed’ in the night, and those taunting classmates are deliberately placed in harm’s way. What a jolly lot of accidents! Once you adjust to the down-and-dirty playing level, the wickedly sharp acting and neatly rhymed story win you over. But it's not the slightly eccentric, but friendly, little town farce you were expecting. (Be sure to run the Deleted Scenes with director Niall Johnson’s commentary track to see the bad choices & structural mistakes that kept this film from hitting its full potential.)

DOUBLE-BILL: Dame Maggie made quite a few of these dark site-specific British comedies. Try the Yorkshire-based A PRIVATE FUNCTION/’85, with pigs & Michael Palin, which Alan Bennett wrote for her before their tour-de-force one-woman monologue BED AMONG THE LENTILS/’88.

Friday, November 18, 2011

M-G-M scraped the bowl to find a second-helping of Robbie the Robot, the breakout ‘personality’ from FORBIDDEN PLANET/’56, in this cheaply made (and very weird) Kiddie Matinee pic. (Originally shown in sepia-tinted prints!) No longer set far in the future, this present day Cold War story has Robbie in storage, sitting in pieces till an under-achieving boy screws him back together. The son of a brilliant scientist, the kid’s been turned into an instant genius after being left alone with his dad’s Top-Secret ‘electronic brain.’ This rebel computer has started to think on its own, and it plans to use Robbie & this newly invisible boy to take over the world! Will the nerdy father hand over the coded control numbers; or stoically watch as Robbie the Robot dismembers his disobedient boy? Er, once the kid returns to his normal ‘visible’ state. As a study in parental indifference, lax military security, God-like sacrifices a la Abraham & Isaac, and eavesdropping computers who only pretend to be asleep, there’s a lot of odd ideas bubbling just below the surface of this shoddy little pic. Too bad it’s in such a lousy production. Even the kid, Richard Eyer, a standout brat in William Wyler’s FRIENDLY PERSUASION/’54, stinks up the joint.

DOUBLE-BILL: Rent a set of LOST IN SPACE tv episodes and have a Robbie the Robot fest.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Betty Grable, the top-grossing female star of her era, is something of a lost cause to modern audiences. (Then again, imagine trying to explain Madonna to future generations.) In this, her penultimate film and last musical, made on loan-out to Columbia from 20th/Fox, she’s been given a breathy singing voice (to sound more like Marilyn Monroe?), but is in good company on a trim little musical about a B’way star who finds herself simultaneously, if innocently, married to both halves of her writing team, Jack Lemmon & Gower Champion. (Yep, it’s another variation on ENOCH ARDEN, by way of Somerset Maugham & an earlier Jean Arthur pic.) Happily, no one presses the ‘dumb farce’ button too hard. Instead, choreographer Jack Cole conjures a neat routine for these three to barely miss each other while dashing around their shared apartment. Since the fourth co-star is Gower’s real-life wife & dancing partner, Marge Champion, there’s not a lot of suspense in how things will work out, but this let’s everyone concentrate on some unexpectedly well-staged musical numbers. In addition to some Gershwin & a few pop songs, Jack Cole goofs around with some Borodin (he’d just done the all-Borodin KISMET on B’way), Tchaikovsky, Liszt & Rossini to good effect. Helmer H. C. Potter and lenser Arthur Arling aid the theatricality with some spotlighting effects that rarely work this well on film. Grable's famous legs hold up nicely, and she looks swell if you remember to tame the color (the make-up is fierce), plus it’s always a kick to watch Lemmon sing & dance in these early credits. But the real surprise are those Champions. Always neat as a pin and efficient in their every move, here, especially in a big duo that closes the second act, they supply the missing element in their quiver: heat. And what a difference it makes! What a shame that musicals have gotten so expensive that they can’t be modest little charmers anymore.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Everybody knows that Marge Champion was filmed playing some of Snow White’s scenes as an aid to the Disney artists. But the cartoon character she actually looks like is . . . Wilma Flintstone!

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

An emblematic peek under the covers of London’s ‘Mod ‘60s’ (and Britain’s cinematic New Wave), Jon Schlesinger’s acclaimed film now looks as studied & hollow as its hedonistic heroine, Julie Christie. (1965 was her breakout year, with this & DOCTOR ZHIVAGO.) Frederic Raphael’s script has a real sense of place & dialogue, but he scores too many easy points and opts for a stilted structural device with Christie dictating memoirs to some unseen party. (A late addition mandated by a nervous producer?) As Christie evolves from fresh young thing to rich, EuroTrash misery, we go along past lovers and a modeling career, with little satisfaction from either. Intellectuals & minor royalty, sybarites of all persuasions, an abortion, an orgy, booze, pills, furs & a yacht, but alas, no repose. If only Christie’s emptiness were met with something stronger than ‘clever’ juxtapositions of rich people and their clueless behavior . Laurence Harvey is perfectly cast as a smooth operator, and Dirk Borgarde manages to make his writer an oddly sympathetic heel. (It helps to be the scripter's alter-ego.) Too bad second-tier lenser Ken Higgins had so much trouble figuring out how to shoot Christie to her advantage. He only unlocks the magic toward the end when we’ve lost all patience.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: A couple of years after this, Frederic Raphael came back with two near-classic screenplays. A more benign look at the glamorous rich in the adored dramedy/romance TWO FOR THE ROAD, with Hollywood helmer Stanley Donen cleverly adopting French New Wave techniques; and a fabulous reteaming with John Schlesinger & Julie Christie in an adaption of Hardy’s FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. Christie still goes thru men like tissue paper (Alan Bates, Peter Finch, Terence Stamp), and she still can’t act, but under the rapturous gaze of lenser Nicolas Roeg, you’d be crazy to care. One of the great underseen literary epics.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Producer David O Selznick must have been hoping for an Italian BRIEF ENCOUNTER/’45 when he ‘silently’ produced this small-scale end-of-the-affair story. He cast his wife, Jennifer Jones, as the married half, and Montgomery Clift, just off FROM HERE TO ETERNITY/’53, as illicit lovers trying to find a bit of privacy in the middle of Rome’s brand new, bustling, ultra-modern Stazione Termini which added prestige & size to a slender plot. When director Roberto Rossellini turned him down*, Selznick went with Vittorio De Sica & his collaborators who, no doubt, hoped for a Hollywood-sized payout between making the devastating UMBERTO D/’52 & the delightful GOLD OF NAPLES/’54. Selznick was even a De Sica fan, he had briefly considered a remake of BICYCLE THIEVES for Cary Grant. (Really!) But he rebuffed De Sica’s 90 min. cut which used the public spaces & open design of the station as a third main character while adding lively vignettes from passers-by to constantly interrupt the lovers. Selznick wanted to concentrate on the uncomfortably neurotic interplay between Jones & Clift, and slashed three reels of atmosphere out of the pic for the American release; adding an exceedingly odd musical short (with Patti Page) to bump up the shrunken running time. The original cut, which unfortunately has a technical problem with its music track on the Criterion DVD, is still a miss . . . but, it’s an interesting miss. And it lets you see what De Sica was aiming for.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: De Sica cast the train station’s Commissioner with a Selznick look–a-like. A subtle dig at the man who makes everybody wait for his say-so before anything can happen.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Selznick may have been on to something with Rossellini. The same year, Ingrid Bergman & George Sanders starred in his remarkable VOYAGE TO ITALY, playing just the sort of unhappily married couple Jennifer Jones and her unseen husband might have been in this film.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Bill Plympton’s distinctive artisanal style of hand-drawn animation is well-suited to this fable on man’s infinite capacity to ignore his own best instincts, his ‘better angels;’ even when they’re as plain as the nose on his face . . . or a set of wings growing out of his back. There’s no dialogue, but grunts & groans tell us all we need to know about the grumpy gun dealer who sells illegal weapons at a dive bar where a small but loyal group of oddball losers congregate. They each have their ‘pipe dreams,’ visualized for us as if Eugene O’Neill had written a pantomime, but then reality brings them back to their drab lives. And that’s when the unwanted wings start to sprout. Fought against, then fought for and fought over (some of the action is pretty grotesque), they annihilate everyone’s plans and turn inertia into ambition before blowing up in everyone’s face. It’s a wild, exhilarating, anarchistic ride. Plympton is especially gifted in clever visual transitions & substitutions, though, on the down side, his storyline & visuals can turn repetitive. But adventurous types won’t want to miss this. At its best, it’s a considerable achievement from an artsy animator best known for one-reel absurdities. NOTE: This feature-length cartoon is not for the kiddies! On the other hand, your teenage son just might flip over it.

Friday, November 11, 2011

No one has ever been able to explain how Leo McCarey held his loose-limbed pics together, especially the phenomenally popular Bing Crosby/Father O’Malley duo of GOING MY WAY/’44 and THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S. With their wise, twinkly priests & benevolent, good-humored nuns, they might be taking place on another planet: roughhousing city kids turn into angelic choirboys; cloying subplots reunite families; and weepy finales get boosted with miraculous displays of generosity in true faith & hard cash. Yet, with only slight indulgence, they remain irresistible. Part of the secret may be McCarey’s background in silent film comedy. Present at creation to Laurel & Hardy, he developed a relaxed feel for the rhythms of comic pacing & the patience to let episodic structures bloom. In this one, Crosby’s padre is sent to give Sister Ingrid Bergman’s rundown parochial school the once over. Will its doors close forever? If anything, we’re less connected to the real world than in the first film. Maybe a good thing. Lesser story materials & less memorable songs hardly matter since these films don’t rise & fall on the usual pluses & minuses. It’s all in the way McCarey riffs on his gags & sentiment, as if he’s playing jazz. It’s also why Ingrid Bergman, given a rapturous close-up from lenser George Barnes, reaches a level of spirituality far beyond anything she achieved when playing Joan of Arc in ‘48.

DOUBLE-BILL: Instead of GOING MY WAY, try McCarey’s decidedly odd final pic, SATAN NEVER SLEEPS/’62 which manages to relocate GOING MY WAY to ‘Red’ China! William Holden & Clifton Webb get the young priest/old priest roles played in GOING by Crosby & Barry Fitzgerald.

CONTEST: Listen as this Catholic school recites the Pledge of Allegiance. Notice something missing? Name and explain the gap to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of any NetFlix DVD.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Hammer Studios made this tidy sexual-blackmail thriller a few years before they started rebooting horror pics in ultra-saturated color with Peter Cushing & Christopher Lee. And while it only reaches about 60% of its potential, it’s (just) odd enough to warrant a look. George Brent is appropriately gray as an unassuming bookshop manager with an invalid wife and an assistant who’s long pined for this nice unavailable man. But he’s also got a live wire in the shop, the young, sexy (and slightly slutty) accounts girl, Diana Dors. She's being chatted up by a lout who gets her to initiate a blackmail scheme against Brent after a reckless kiss. But when things go too far, people start to die, and Brent becomes the likely suspect. Terence Fisher, Hammer’s house helmer, gets some moody atmosphere out of actual London locations, and the bookshop is a claustrophobic marvel. (Is it a real place?) If only the blackmail scheme and the intimations of psychotic behavior had been fully exploited. With that in mind, note the credit for adaptation. Why it’s Frederick Knott of DIAL M FOR MURDER fame. Too bad they didn’t really let him run with this, the last act shows glimmers of something much stronger. But hold on for a great ‘thrill shot’ during some amateur sleuthing near the end. It’s worth the whole movie.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: The classic read on quaint old London bookshops is 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD by Helene Hanff. You can read it in less time than it takes to watch the so-so movie they made of it in 1987.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Ray Milland is the terminally ill transplant specialist who needs a fresh body to graft his healthy head on. ‘Rosie’ Grier is the death row inmate who volunteers in the hope of gaining a little extra time to prove his innocence. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, did I mention that the good doctor is a horrible racist? If only the movie were as outrageous as its set up. Alas, this goofball release from Grade B film marketeers American International Pictures has the heart, soul & look of ‘70s a tv Movie-of-the-Week, with a few car & motorcycle chase scenes thrown in. A big fandango with 14 police cars is impressively destructive, but megger Lee Frost hasn’t a clue on how to put cause-and-effect into an action scene, random mayhem is his limit. Still, in its tactless way, the film is not without social/political interest as a blunt bigotry litmus test.. But it does go awfully flat whenever it tries to be funny. If it simply let its absurdist tendencies play out, it might have been nearly entertaining. That is, if someone other than Milland knew how to act.

DOUBLE-BILL: The idea of a white bigot trapped inside the body of a black man had recently appeared in Francis Coppola’s disastrous attempt at FINIAN’S RAINBOW/’68, made twenty years after the stage show opened & twenty years before it might have worked as a period piece. And don’t forget WATERMELON MAN/’70. Still a better pairing might come from another double-headed film fiasco, HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING/’89, the career-cratering follow up pic for helmer Bruce Robinson & Richard E. Grant just off their indispensable WITHNAIL AND I/’87

Monday, November 7, 2011

This mesmerizing Cold War endgame pic is a tru-life spy story that might have been written by John Le Carré.* It’s largely about Sergei Gregoriev (well played by Emir Kusturica), a highly placed Russian official who proves his trustworthiness not by leaking Soviet secrets, but by showing how many contacts & how much intelligence has leeched from the U.S. to the U.S.S.R. President Reagan (a delighted Fred Ward) & his staff, especially the CIA (Willem Dafoe), are gobsmacked. Now that he has their attention, Gregoriev hopes to leak enough info to decimate Soviet intelligence operations. Not for money or revenge or a ticket to freedom, but because he believes it can get his beloved, but moribund country out of deadlock; basically, he’s doing it for his son. And he pulls this off, not thru the usual Spy vs Spy channels, but with the terrified assistance of a mid-level French official living in Moscow with his family (Guillaume Canet). It may look like domestic intrigue, but the stakes are as high as they come. Christian Carion, who helmed & co-scripted, does a beautiful job keeping the operations clear and ratcheting up the tension. Even better is how the film incorporates the complicated family lives of these men, and in showing how their heroic actions may have done more in bringing down the Iron Curtain than all the Reagan White House military defense spending could muster. A superb film, and a bit shocking to note that this exciting & important work didn’t rate a theatrical run in the States.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *A barely recognizable David Soul plays an aide to Reagan named Hatton, but he’s made up to look just like Lyn Nofzinger. He gets to sit with the Prez and watch THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE/’62. SPOILER ALERT!: They show who shot him!

DOUBLE-BILL: Why not try John Le Carré’s RUSSIA HOUSE/’90, Fred Schepisi helms Sean Connery & Michelle Pfieffer in a Tom Stoppard script. It’s an underrated film with similarities to this story. How much did Le Carré know?

Saturday, November 5, 2011

KINO/Lorber’s much-appreciated DVD upgrade restores Vittorio De Sica’s tri-part comedy to its gorgeous, sexy, hilarious self. The tour of Italy starts in Naples where poor women can only keep out of jail by staying pregnant. But even when your wife is Sophia Loren, seven squalling kids are enough to make Marcello Mastroianni too pooped to pop. Then we’re off to Milan where a chic Sophia tries to drive away ennui with a new Rolls-Royce & a new romantic prospect. But can Marcello’s bookish intellectual handle a luxury car & a luxury woman? Now, to Rome where Marcello’s businessman is stopping in town to pay a few bribes and spend some quality time with his favorite call-girl. Guess who. But there’s a distraction on the neighboring terrace, a young seminary student who’s thinking of ditching God for Sophia. (There’s a difference?) De Sica’s broad comic tone is wonderfully assured here, combining smooth film technique with warm-hearted perfs from his irreplaceable stars. It’s not only that he gets the details right, he makes them specific, The film is a tourist's dream, but not a tourist’s trap. A big difference. It’s often forgotten (and bizarrely held against him by film academic types) that De Sica, the great Neo-Realist humanist, was also one film’s greatest entertainers. Working beautifully with Giuseppe Rotunno on magnificent locations (and cunningly matched studio interiors, what editing!), he generates huge laughs just on the camera set ups. The middle segment, an adagio between allegros, is a bit thin, Antonioni & Visconti appear to be the targets, but it shares in the remarkable use of space & composition. Five decades on, the film remains the most civilized of racy entertainments imaginable.

One of the first straight-ahead anti-Nazi pics, CONFESSIONS is so cleverly pieced together & excitingly paced, you hardly notice how thin this episodic FBI procedural actually is. The first act is all Germans & German-Americans plotting, spying, beer drinking, sneaking in on the S.S. Bismarck & congregating at the local German-American Bund. Finally, the F.B.I. comes into the frame when Edward G. Robinson shows up in the fourth reel, something of a late-entry record for a top-billed star. But Eddie’s always worth the wait, and with his paradoxically calm/staccato professorial manner, he teases out the conspiracy, picking off suspects and playing them against each other. No rough stuff from a country that’s still officially neutral, Eddie finesses confessions out of them. On paper, it doesn’t sound like much, but Anatole Litvak helms with an energy level that moves too fast to feel didactic as we go on a Stateside tour of pro-Nazi rallies for kids; a political riot in a NYC rathskellar & watch Gestapo enforcers operating in midtown. And the film is loaded with clever visual touches like the crisscrossing waiters who the camera follows from one conspirator to another or the florid expository montages (probably from Don Siegel) with swastika ‘wipes’ and just about every ‘optical printer’ trick in the book. The courtroom scenes are a bit of an anticlimax, Henry O’Neill is an underwhelming prosecutor, and the film loses dramatic density when George Sanders’s conflicted Nazi agent goes missing. But Francis Lederer is just right as a thickheaded, overconfident immigrant who buys the Nazi propaganda Paul Lukas spews out in the style of Hitler playing an East-Side Manhattan beer garden.

DOUBLE-BILL: Warners made a comic variant in ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT/’42. It’s pretty lame stuff, even with Bogie, Conrad Veidt & Peter Lorre in the cast. But the change in tone from the jittery pre-Pearl Harbor days to the laughing-in-the-dark atmosphere of early war losses is fascinating.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell uncovers a family drama right out of August Strindberg in the last act of the life of Norwegian author/Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun, and his wife & family. Max von Sydow & Ghita Norby are simply magnificent as a mutually dependent husband & wife who can’t bear the sight of each other. And, more than just the story of an aging literary lion who terrorizes his family as his talent recedes, there’s extra historical interest in the enthusiastic support they gave to the Nazi occupation. Troell only lets us see the paths that brought them to their appalling (and highly unpopular) positions peripherally. The roots of Hamsun’s long festering hatred of the British apparently dated back to WWI, but are never spelled out. This has the advantage of avoiding simplistic ‘cause-and-effect’ answers on motivation, and lends unusual complexity to the portrait of willful political ignorance so often seen in brilliant, but congenitally stubborn people. Happily, that’s a condition which seems to have bypassed Troell who helms, writes, edits & shoots his work and who took a great risk in letting Sydow act in Swedish, Norby in Danish and everyone else in Norwegian. (Heck, it was Greek to me.) Er, except, that is, for Hitler & his gang who speak German in the devastating meeting Hamsun has with the Fuhrer. One of many highlights in this remarkable, under-seen film.

Hollywood calculus on Broadway composer bio-pics runs in direct disproportion to their talent. Hence, Jerome Kern, Rodgers & Hart and Cole Porter get ridiculous pics, while George M. Cohan, Kalmar & Ruby & Sigmund Romberg ‘win, place & show.’ Maybe it’s just lower expectations.* Whatever the cause, this film’s a breezy, unexpected charmer for anyone not completely allergic to operetta. Stanley Donen, who couldn’t have been thrilled with the assignment, strips down the usual fusty M-G-M look for speed & forward momentum, while Roger Edens, long-time second to M-G-M master-of-musicals Arthur Freed, called in every favor he had on the lot to stuff his first solo credit with fab specialty numbers. José Ferrer, skewered in THE BAND WAGON/’53 as a credit hog, was always a bit of a cold fish . . . so he’s just right for Romberg, a man who put all his passion into big slurpy melodies. Ferrer’s real life wife, Rosemary Clooney, stops by to share a verse, but José really scores acting out an entire B’way show in an eight minute marathon ‘numbo.’ (The fictitious show, JAZZ-A-DOO, is presumably BOMBO, a big hit for Al Jolson in 1921 which means BLACKFACE ALERT!) Gene Kelly does a nifty duo with brother Fred; Cyd Charisse is incredibly sexy in DESERT SONG and, a bit later, her husband, Tony Martin, incredibly virile on Oscar Hammerstein’s God-given lyric for ‘LOVER COME BACK; Jane Powell & Vic Damone aim for the fences in full operetta mode; Ann Miller looks, for once, like a complete dancer; and producer Edens, in a casting coup, has an Isolde up his sleeve, the great, rather matronly Wagnerian soprano Helen Traubel. She pours out the goods as Romberg’s mentor, then brings it down to a fine thread for a frankly gorgeous ‘SOFTLY, AS IN MORNING SUNRISE.’ Lots of opera stars tried to make the move from The Met to Hollywood, but few took so naturally to it. No wonder Edens immediately worked up a smash Las Vegas act for her, that Jerry Lewis & Blake Edwards cast her in films or that she co-starred with Groucho Marx in THE MIKADO on tv.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Naturally, the one guy the studios really wanted was the one guy they could never get: Irving Berlin. Not only the biggest catalog of hits, he had, by far, the most dramatic life story; Dickens couldn’t have dreamed it up. But Berlin was too smart to sell. A tough & savvy salesman, he preferred quasi-bio-pics which let him dip into his catalog over & over & over.DOUBLE-BILL: Romberg’s shows were considered old-fashioned even when they were new, but that didn’t stop Hollywood from turning them into hit films, even in the silent days. Ernst Lubitsch’s THE STUDENT PRINCE/’27 is bittersweet perfection, with Ramon Novarro, Norma Shearer & a naughty dachshund all giving the performances of their lives. (But it needs a better musical soundtrack then it has on the current DVD.)

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

At a paunchy 56, Spencer Tracy is a tough sell as either a skilled mountaineer or as the big brother of 26 yr-old Robert Wagner in this handsome, but empty Edward Dmytryk film. A plane crash in the Alps, near the brothers’ village, has brought outsiders to town: state officials, mail inspectors, newsman, insurance agents. But when the sanctioned rescue party fails to reach the crash site, Wagner presses his retired brother to help him make the dangerous climb for plunder. Tracy reluctantly goes along as protector & guide, but when they find a survivor among the wreckage, their mission has to change . . . or does it? Edward Dmytryk, trying for the calm authority of Fred Zinnemann or William Wyler, shows effective patience during the climbing sequences, but Ranald MacDougall’s script paints the contrasting brothers with too broad a brush. Tracy’s good/noble peasant vs Wagner’s venal/callow youth. How much stronger the drama would play if we could at least partially sympathize with the young man’s desperation to get away from cows, sheep & simple souls. But only the superb cinematography of Franz Planer rises to the dramatic level Dmytryk is aiming at. And what a show Planer makes of it! Shooting on location in the enviable VistaVision format, there’s so much depth & clarity to the images, even the special effects & process shots go far above the norm. No small consideration when you’ve got to fake every mountain climbing scene for the physically restricted Tracy.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Okay, how ‘bout: HEAR THIS, NOT THAT? Get a real taste of mountain air with Richard Strauss’s ultra-humongous AN ALPINE SYMPHONY/ EINE ALPENSINFONIE. What version? Well, Christian Thielemann conducting the Vienna Philharmonic on DG is pretty tough to beat.

A last thought before we go.

Well, enough from me. But before we sign off, here's a great quote from Emile Zola's L'OEUVRE (THE MASTERPIECE), which is about painting rather than the yet to be invented medium of film, but which points a fine critical eye toward the whole idea of art criticism. It's a good, if chilly, thought to keep in mind, especially when you surf the net.

"Has it ever struck you that posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we like to think it is?

"Suppose the artist's paradise turned out to be as nonexistent as the Catholics, and future generations prove just as misguided as the present one and persisted in liking pretty pretty dabbling better than honest to goodness painting. There are some accepted masterpieces for which I myself wouldn't give a twopenny damn.

"Classical training has given us a wrong view of everything and forces us to acclaim as geniuses a lot of fellows who are no more than well-balanced, facile painters, while what we might really prefer is the work of more emancipated but less even artists known only to an initiated few. Immortality at present depends entirely on the average, middle-class mind and is reserved only for the names that have been most forcibly impressed upon us while we were still unable to defend ourselves...

"Perhaps that's the sort of thing that's best left unsaid. It's certainly the sort of thing that gives me the shudders!"- Emile Zola